KWAYE Is One of the Greatest Artists You Haven’t Heard of Yet

We get a lot of new music in our inboxes each day. Sometimes, we'll also get CDs packaged up and sent in the post, despite the fact most laptops aren't made with CD drives anymore (just last week, somebody sent me three Now That's What I Call Classic Soul CDs for reasons I have yet to decipher but which I also wholly appreciate).

Anyway, because there is so much new music being pumped into the world on a daily basis, it's obviously hard to get straight up gassed about all of it. Some of it is good, some of it is 'meh' and some of it is not good at all. When this video for "Little Ones" by Zimbabwe-born, London-based musician KWAYE dropped into my inbox, though, I had to turn up the speakers and watch it once again, then again, then again, and now I've rinsed it so hard I honestly think I see it on loop in my head when I sleep.

Part Prince, part Sade and part Blood Orange, KWAYE takes all the most flavoursome elements of 1980s synth-pop and R&B and sprinkles it with originality, pushing it into the present day. The video itself sees him and a bunch of frankly beautiful people dance under the cover of darkness in a church before the whole thing builds up to an emotionally-charged, tightly-choreographed crescendo. According to what he sent us in an email, these people "represent different parts of his past that have felt previously constrained and repressed. From beginning to end we see the transformation/rebirth of KWAYE as someone who is breaking loose from the boundaries of containment to someone in control and finally empowered with self worth."

This is only the second track and video KWAYE has released (the first was the equally addictive ear-worm "Cool Kids"). So yeah, press play on "Little Ones" above and prepare for your new obsession.